OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Multimodal Conversational AI: A Survey of Datasets and Approaches
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

As humans, we experience the world with all our senses or modalities (sound, sight, touch, smell, and taste). We use these modalities, particularly sight and touch, to convey and interpret specific meanings. Multimodal expressions are central to conversations; a rich set of modalities amplify and often compensate for each other. A multimodal conversational AI system answers questions, fulfills tasks, and emulates human conversations by understanding and expressing itself via multiple modalities. This paper motivates, defines, and mathematically formulates the multimodal conversational research objective. We provide a taxonomy of research required to solve the objective: multimodal representation, fusion, alignment, translation, and co-learning. We survey state-of-the-art datasets and approaches for each research area and highlight their limiting assumptions. Finally, we identify multimodal co-learning as a promising direction for multimodal conversational AI research.
ACT now: Aggregate Comparison of Traces for Incident Localization
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2022
Year: 2022

Incidents in production systems are common and downtime is expensive. Applying an appropriate mitigating action quickly, such as changing a specific firewall rule, reverting a change, or diverting traffic to a different availability zone, saves money. Incident localization is time-consuming since a single failure can have many effects, extending far from the site of failure. Knowing how different system events relate to each other is necessary to quickly identify \emph{where} to mitigate. Our approach, Aggregate Comparison of Traces (ACT), localizes incidents by comparing sets of traces (which capture events and their relationships for individual requests) sampled from the most recent steady-state operation and during an incident. In our quantitative experiments, we show that ACT is able to effectively localize more than 99% of incidents.
DendroMap: Visual Exploration of Large-Scale Image Datasets for Machine Learning with Treemaps
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2022
Year: 2022

In this paper, we present DendroMap, a novel approach to interactively exploring large-scale image datasets for machine learning (ML). ML practitioners often explore image datasets by generating a grid of images or projecting high-dimensional representations of images into 2-D using dimensionality reduction techniques (e.g., t-SNE). However, neither approach effectively scales to large datasets because images are ineffectively organized and interactions are insufficiently supported. To address these challenges, we develop DendroMap by adapting Treemaps, a well-known visualization technique. DendroMap effectively organizes images by extracting hierarchical cluster structures from high-dimensional representations of images. It enables users to make sense of the overall distributions of datasets and interactively zoom into specific areas of interests at multiple levels of abstraction. Our case studies with widely-used image datasets for deep learning demonstrate that users can discover insights about datasets and trained models by examining the diversity of images, identifying underperforming subgroups, and analyzing classification errors. We conducted a user study that evaluates the effectiveness of DendroMap in grouping and searching tasks by comparing it with a gridified version of t-SNE and found that participants preferred DendroMap. DendroMap is available at https://div-lab.github.io/dendromap/.
Bayesian Physics-Informed Extreme Learning Machine for Forward and Inverse PDE Problems with Noisy Data
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Physics-informed extreme learning machine (PIELM) has recently received significant attention as a rapid version of physics-informed neural network (PINN) for solving partial differential equations (PDEs). The key characteristic is to fix the input layer weights with random values and use Moore-Penrose generalized inverse for the output layer weights. The framework is effective, but it easily suffers from overfitting noisy data and lacks uncertainty quantification for the solution under noise scenarios.To this end, we develop the Bayesian physics-informed extreme learning machine (BPIELM) to solve both forward and inverse linear PDE problems with noisy data in a unified framework. In our framework, a prior probability distribution is introduced in the output layer for extreme learning machine with physic laws and the Bayesian method is used to estimate the posterior of parameters. Besides, for inverse PDE problems, problem parameters considered as new output layer weights are unified in a framework with forward PDE problems. Finally, we demonstrate BPIELM considering both forward problems, including Poisson, advection, and diffusion equations, as well as inverse problems, where unknown problem parameters are estimated. The results show that, compared with PIELM, BPIELM quantifies uncertainty arising from noisy data and provides more accurate predictions. In addition, BPIELM is considerably cheaper than PINN in terms of the computational cost.
NR-RRT: Neural Risk-Aware Near-Optimal Path Planning in Uncertain Nonconvex Environments
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

Balancing the trade-off between safety and efficiency is of significant importance for path planning under uncertainty. Many risk-aware path planners have been developed to explicitly limit the probability of collision to an acceptable bound in uncertain environments. However, convex obstacles or Gaussian uncertainties are usually assumed to make the problem tractable in the existing method. These assumptions limit the generalization and application of path planners in real-world implementations. In this article, we propose to apply deep learning methods to the sampling-based planner, developing a novel risk bounded near-optimal path planning algorithm named neural risk-aware RRT (NR-RRT). Specifically, a deterministic risk contours map is maintained by perceiving the probabilistic nonconvex obstacles, and a neural network sampler is proposed to predict the next most-promising safe state. Furthermore, the recursive divide-and-conquer planning and bidirectional search strategies are used to accelerate the convergence to a near-optimal solution with guaranteed bounded risk. Worst-case theoretical guarantees can also be proven owing to a standby safety guaranteed planner utilizing a uniform sampling distribution. Simulation experiments demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art remarkably for finding risk bounded low-cost paths in seen and unseen environments with uncertainty and nonconvex constraints.
RASAT: Integrating Relational Structures into Pretrained Seq2Seq Model for Text-to-SQL
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Relational structures such as schema linking and schema encoding have been validated as a key component to qualitatively translating natural language into SQL queries. However, introducing these structural relations comes with prices: they often result in a specialized model structure, which largely prohibits using large pretrained models in text-to-SQL. To address this problem, we propose RASAT: a Transformer seq2seq architecture augmented with relation-aware self-attention that could leverage a variety of relational structures while inheriting the pretrained parameters from the T5 model effectively. Our model can incorporate almost all types of existing relations in the literature, and in addition, we propose introducing co-reference relations for the multi-turn scenario. Experimental results on three widely used text-to-SQL datasets, covering both single-turn and multi-turn scenarios, have shown that RASAT could achieve state-of-the-art results across all three benchmarks (75.5% EX on Spider, 52.6% IEX on SParC, and 37.4% IEX on CoSQL).
Evaluating Membership Inference Through Adversarial Robustness
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2022
Year: 2022

The usage of deep learning is being escalated in many applications. Due to its outstanding performance, it is being used in a variety of security and privacy-sensitive areas in addition to conventional applications. One of the key aspects of deep learning efficacy is to have abundant data. This trait leads to the usage of data which can be highly sensitive and private, which in turn causes wariness with regard to deep learning in the general public. Membership inference attacks are considered lethal as they can be used to figure out whether a piece of data belongs to the training dataset or not. This can be problematic with regards to leakage of training data information and its characteristics. To highlight the significance of these types of attacks, we propose an enhanced methodology for membership inference attacks based on adversarial robustness, by adjusting the directions of adversarial perturbations through label smoothing under a white-box setting. We evaluate our proposed method on three datasets: Fashion-MNIST, CIFAR-10, and CIFAR-100. Our experimental results reveal that the performance of our method surpasses that of the existing adversarial robustness-based method when attacking normally trained models. Additionally, through comparing our technique with the state-of-the-art metric-based membership inference methods, our proposed method also shows better performance when attacking adversarially trained models. The code for reproducing the results of this work is available at \url{https://github.com/plll4zzx/Evaluating-Membership-Inference-Through-Adversarial-Robustness}.
ACID: A Low Dimensional Characterization of Markov-Modulated and Self-Exciting Counting Processes
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2022
Year: 2022

The conditional intensity (CI) of a counting process $Y_t$ is based on the minimal knowledge $\mathcal{F}_t^Y$, i.e., on the observation of $Y_t$ alone. Prominently, the mutual information rate of a signal and its Poisson channel output is a difference functional between the CI and the intensity that has full knowledge about the input. While the CI of Markov-modulated Poisson processes evolves according to Snyder's filter, self-exciting processes, e.g., Hawkes processes, specify the CI via the history of $Y_t$. The emergence of the CI as a self-contained stochastic process prompts us to bring its statistical ensemble into focus. We investigate the asymptotic conditional intensity distribution (ACID) and emphasize its rich information content. We assume the case in which the CI is determined from a sufficient statistic that progresses as a Markov process. We present a simulation-free method to compute the ACID when the dimension of the sufficient statistic is low. The method is made possible by introducing a backward recurrence time parametrization, which has the advantage to align all probability inflow in a boundary condition for the master equation. Case studies illustrate the usage of ACID for three primary examples: 1) the Poisson channels with binary Markovian input (as an example of a Markov-modulated Poisson process), 2) the standard Hawkes process with exponential kernel (as an example of a self-exciting counting process) and 3) the Gamma filter (as an example of an approximate filter to a Markov-modulated Poisson process).
Importance Weighted Structure Learning for Scene Graph Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Scene graph generation is a structured prediction task aiming to explicitly model objects and their relationships via constructing a visually-grounded scene graph for an input image. Currently, the message passing neural network based mean field variational Bayesian methodology is the ubiquitous solution for such a task, in which the variational inference objective is often assumed to be the classical evidence lower bound. However, the variational approximation inferred from such loose objective generally underestimates the underlying posterior, which often leads to inferior generation performance. In this paper, we propose a novel importance weighted structure learning method aiming to approximate the underlying log-partition function with a tighter importance weighted lower bound, which is computed from multiple samples drawn from a reparameterizable Gumbel-Softmax sampler. A generic entropic mirror descent algorithm is applied to solve the resulting constrained variational inference task. The proposed method achieves the state-of-the-art performance on various popular scene graph generation benchmarks.
Naturalistic Causal Probing for Morpho-Syntax
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Probing has become a go-to methodology for interpreting and analyzing deep neural models in natural language processing. However, there is still a lack of understanding of the limitations and weaknesses of various types of probes. In this work, we suggest a strategy for input-level intervention on naturalistic sentences. Using our approach, we intervene on the morpho-syntactic features of a sentence, while keeping the rest of the sentence unchanged. Such an intervention allows us to causally probe pre-trained models. We apply our naturalistic causal probing framework to analyze the effects of grammatical gender and number on contextualized representations extracted from three pre-trained models in Spanish: the multilingual versions of BERT, RoBERTa, and GPT-2. Our experiments suggest that naturalistic interventions lead to stable estimates of the causal effects of various linguistic properties. Moreover, our experiments demonstrate the importance of naturalistic causal probing when analyzing pre-trained models.
What do Models Learn From Training on More Than Text? Measuring Visual Commonsense Knowledge
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

There are limitations in learning language from text alone. Therefore, recent focus has been on developing multimodal models. However, few benchmarks exist that can measure what language models learn about language from multimodal training. We hypothesize that training on a visual modality should improve on the visual commonsense knowledge in language models. Therefore, we introduce two evaluation tasks for measuring visual commonsense knowledge in language models and use them to evaluate different multimodal models and unimodal baselines. Primarily, we find that the visual commonsense knowledge is not significantly different between the multimodal models and unimodal baseline models trained on visual text data.
An Architecture for the detection of GAN-generated Flood Images with Localization Capabilities
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

In this paper, we address a new image forensics task, namely the detection of fake flood images generated by ClimateGAN architecture. We do so by proposing a hybrid deep learning architecture including both a detection and a localization branch, the latter being devoted to the identification of the image regions manipulated by ClimateGAN. Even if our goal is the detection of fake flood images, in fact, we found that adding a localization branch helps the network to focus on the most relevant image regions with significant improvements in terms of generalization capabilities and robustness against image processing operations. The good performance of the proposed architecture is validated on two datasets of pristine flood images downloaded from the internet and three datasets of fake flood images generated by ClimateGAN starting from a large set of diverse street images.
GoalNet: Inferring Conjunctive Goal Predicates from Human Plan Demonstrations for Robot Instruction Following
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

Our goal is to enable a robot to learn how to sequence its actions to perform tasks specified as natural language instructions, given successful demonstrations from a human partner. The ability to plan high-level tasks can be factored as (i) inferring specific goal predicates that characterize the task implied by a language instruction for a given world state and (ii) synthesizing a feasible goal-reaching action-sequence with such predicates. For the former, we leverage a neural network prediction model, while utilizing a symbolic planner for the latter. We introduce a novel neuro-symbolic model, GoalNet, for contextual and task dependent inference of goal predicates from human demonstrations and linguistic task descriptions. GoalNet combines (i) learning, where dense representations are acquired for language instruction and the world state that enables generalization to novel settings and (ii) planning, where the cause-effect modeling by the symbolic planner eschews irrelevant predicates facilitating multi-stage decision making in large domains. GoalNet demonstrates a significant improvement (51%) in the task completion rate in comparison to a state-of-the-art rule-based approach on a benchmark data set displaying linguistic variations, particularly for multi-stage instructions.
Blind Goal-Oriented Massive Access for Future Wireless Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2022
Year: 2022

Emerging communication networks are envisioned to support massive wireless connectivity of heterogeneous devices with sporadic traffic and diverse requirements in terms of latency, reliability, and bandwidth. Providing multiple access to an increasing number of uncoordinated users and sharing the limited resources become essential in this context. In this work, we revisit the random access (RA) problem and exploit the continuous angular group sparsity feature of wireless channels to propose a novel RA strategy that provides low latency, high reliability, and massive access with limited bandwidth resources in an all-in-one package. To this end, we first design a reconstruction-free goal-oriented optimization problem, which only preserves the angular information required to identify the active devices. To solve this, we propose an alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) and derive closed-form expressions for each ADMM step. Then, we design a clustering algorithm that assigns the users in specific groups from which we can identify active stationary devices by their angles. For mobile devices, we propose an alternating minimization algorithm to recover their data and their channel gains simultaneously, which allows us to identify active mobile users. Simulation results show significant performance gains in terms of active user detection and false alarm probabilities as compared to state-of-the-art RA schemes, even with limited number of preambles. Moreover, unlike prior work, the performance of the proposed blind goal-oriented massive access does not depend on the number of devices.
Multi-modal curb detection and filtering
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Reliable knowledge of road boundaries is critical for autonomous vehicle navigation. We propose a robust curb detection and filtering technique based on the fusion of camera semantics and dense lidar point clouds. The lidar point clouds are collected by fusing multiple lidars for robust feature detection. The camera semantics are based on a modified EfficientNet architecture which is trained with labeled data collected from onboard fisheye cameras. The point clouds are associated with the closest curb segment with $L_2$-norm analysis after projecting into the image space with the fisheye model projection. Next, the selected points are clustered using unsupervised density-based spatial clustering to detect different curb regions. As new curb points are detected in consecutive frames they are associated with the existing curb clusters using temporal reachability constraints. If no reachability constraints are found a new curb cluster is formed from these new points. This ensures we can detect multiple curbs present in road segments consisting of multiple lanes if they are in the sensors' field of view. Finally, Delaunay filtering is applied for outlier removal and its performance is compared to traditional RANSAC-based filtering. An objective evaluation of the proposed solution is done using a high-definition map containing ground truth curb points obtained from a commercial map supplier. The proposed system has proven capable of detecting curbs of any orientation in complex urban road scenarios comprising straight roads, curved roads, and intersections with traffic isles.
FROG: Forward-Secure Post-Quantum Signature
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2022
Year: 2022

Forward-secure signatures guarantee that the signatures generated before the compromise of private key remain secure, and therefore offer an enhanced compromise-resiliency for real-life applications such as digital forensics, audit logs, and financial systems. However, the vast majority of state-of-the-art forward-secure signatures rely on conventional intractability assumptions and therefore are not secure against quantum computers. Hash-based signatures (HBS) (e.g., XMSS) can offer forward-secure post-quantum security. However, they are efficient only for a pre-defined number of messages to be signed and incur high key generation overhead, highly expensive signing, and large signature sizes for an increasing number of messages. It is an open problem to develop quantum-safe forward-secure signatures that are efficient and practical with a signing capability scalable to their security parameters. In this work, we propose a new series of post-quantum signatures that we call FROG (Forward-secuRe pOst-quantum siGnature). Unlike HBS alternatives, FROG can achieve highly computational efficient signatures with sub-linear key/signature sizes and (practically) unbounded signing capability. This is achieved by transforming suitable post-quantum signatures into forward-secure settings via MMM constructions. We investigated the transformation of prominent post-quantum secure signatures such as Dilithium, WOTS, and BLISS with MMM. Our experiments indicate that FROG outperforms XMSS for the vast majority (if not all for a large number of messages) of performance metrics. We also discuss one-time variants of these base signature schemes that can push the performance of FROG to the edge. Overall, FROG shows a better performance than the existing alternatives with forward-security and therefore is an ideal alternative for the standardization efforts for forward-secure post-quantum signatures.
Revisiting Facial Key Point Detection: An Efficient Approach Using Deep Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Facial landmark detection is a widely researched field of deep learning as this has a wide range of applications in many fields. These key points are distinguishing characteristic points on the face, such as the eyes center, the eye's inner and outer corners, the mouth center, and the nose tip from which human emotions and intent can be explained. The focus of our work has been evaluating transfer learning models such as MobileNetV2 and NasNetMobile, including custom CNN architectures. The objective of the research has been to develop efficient deep learning models in terms of model size, parameters, and inference time and to study the effect of augmentation imputation and fine-tuning on these models. It was found that while augmentation techniques produced lower RMSE scores than imputation techniques, they did not affect the inference time. MobileNetV2 architecture produced the lowest RMSE and inference time. Moreover, our results indicate that manually optimized CNN architectures performed similarly to Auto Keras tuned architecture. However, manually optimized architectures yielded better inference time and training curves.